What COVID-19 did to European aviation in 2020

EUROCONTROL’s latest Think Paper, the eighth in a series of thought-provoking papers aimed at industry leaders and policy-makers, uses exclusive EUROCONTROL aviation data to run the big numbers for 2020, providing a timely and authoritative review of the total impact of COVID-19 across all industry stakeholders.

The paper explores the impact on overall flight demand, airline and aircraft, airports, states and air navigation service providers.

The main headlines include:

• 56.2 billion losses for airlines, airports & ANSPs
• 1.7 billion fewer passengers
• 6.1 million fewer flights, 55% down on 2019
  • intra-European traffic 54% down
  • Europe-Rest of the World traffic 59% down
  • low cost carrier flights 62% down
  • scheduled carrier flights 59% down
• 51% of all aircraft grounded at year-end
• 191,000 announced direct job losses

The paper also reflects on the impacts to sustainability. With the decrease in flights, emissions have obviously declined in a similar manner with 56.7% reduction when compared to 2019. The reduction in flights meant virtually no capacity constraints or congestion resulting in more direct flight profiles and a removal of over 1200 restrictions enabling up to 26,000nm per day.

Moving forward into 2021, it is predicted that traffic will recover to 51% of 2019 volumes, with the recovery gathering pace from the summer onwards as vaccine rollouts take effect. Scenario 2 (vaccine widely, not partially available travellers, or pandemic end by summer 2022) in the EUROCONTROL STATFOR 5-year forecast is now considered the most likely, which anticipates traffic returning to approximately 90% of 2019 levels by 2024 with 2019 level reached by 2026.  

The paper closes with a few predictions for 2021 and key conclusions that should be acted upon to address several core issues, including decarbonisation, economic regulation, airspace management and ensuring that regional connectivity is maintained.

ERA stands ready to support EUROCONTROL, the Network Manager and the wider industry in helping to deliver on these important reforms so that we can build back better.